IUR

International UFO Reporter

Volume 30, Number 1

John Podesta, White House chief of staff under

President Clinton, backs the Kecksburg initiative.

Nearby resident Bill Bulebush saw the object

descend and located it before the military arrived.

F

ORTY

YEARS

OF

SECRECY

:

NASA,

THE

MILITARY

,

AND

THE

1965 K

ECKSBURG

CRASH

Artist’s conception (above) by Charles Hanna of the object that crashed

near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, December 9, 1965. Statement of jazz

musician Jerry Betters (left), who was ordered at gunpoint to leave the

area after he and his friends saw a large acorn-shaped object on the back

of an Army flatbed truck the night of the alleged UFO crash.

IUR ✦ 30:1

3

Leslie Kean is an investigative jour-
nalist who has published pieces
related to the UFO subject for the
Boston Globe and the Providence Jour-
nal, and through wide distribution by
the New York Times and Knight Ridder-
Tribune wire services.

F

ORTY

YEARS

OF

SECRECY

:

NASA,

THE

MILITARY

,

AND

THE

1965 K

ECKSBURG

CRASH

BY

L

ESLIE

K

EAN

T

his December marks the 40th anniversary of one
of the most thoroughly researched and intrigu-
ing crash/retrieval cases in America. Despite a
top-notch investigation spanning more than

three decades and world-wide attention in recent years from
a new campaign probing the case, the Kecksburg, Pennsyl-
vania, UFO crash of 1965 remains unsolved, due mainly to
the stubborn silence of American government agencies.

Unlike the Roswell crash, this case has been relatively

uncontaminated by commercialism and the popular media.
It does not feature bodies found at the scene; it involves an
atypical object, suggesting a range of explanations; and it
includes many living witnesses. The central witnesses re-
main unknown to most people interested in UFOs, and none
of them have benefited from coming forward. Also in
contrast to the Roswell case, the dramatic military response
to the crash was reported by television, radio, and newspa-
pers as it developed, and was witnessed by hundreds of
people who descended on the tiny town from miles around.
Unfortunately, no high-level Army, Air Force, or intelli-
gence personnel involved with the Kecksburg retrieval have
come forward in any way that can be of use to the case, as
they did for the Roswell case many years after it occurred.

The sheer volume of witness and local news reports

show that on December 9, 1965, an object landed near the
village of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles south-
east of Pittsburgh, after being observed as a fireball in the
sky across several U.S. states and Canada. Some Pennsylva-
nia residents saw the object moving slowly in the sky; others
saw smoke and brilliant bluish-white lights like an electric
arc when it first crashed. Five witnesses eventually provided
independent, corroborated descriptions of the object and its
exact location in the woods. Dozens of others—including

firefighters, newspaper reporters, and a radio news director
at radio station WHJB (who was on the scene taping inter-
views)—describe the large military and police presence at
the impact site and the cordoning off of the area. Observers
provided detailed descriptions of an object being trans-
ported out on a flatbed truck. Many witnesses have signed
statements for investigator Stan Gordon of Greensburg,
Pennsylvania, who has been working on the case for over
three decades. (See his website at www.stangordon.com.)

To this day, no one knows what triggered the interest of

the U.S. military, or why the Army was so intent on hiding
the object that it threatened civilians with weapons. The
subsequent Air Force denial that anything at all came down
is even more perplexing, and has led to heated speculation.
In the ensuing 40 years, members of the once tightly knit
community in rural Pennsylvania have been torn apart by the
continuing unanswered questions about what happened. As
American citizens, they have not been granted the informa-
tion due them by law under the Freedom of Information Act.
This case addresses issues that go beyond the question of
determining the origin of the strange object that—as indi-
cated by so many accounts—was recovered by our govern-
ment that night.

However, two exciting breakthroughs occurred in 2003

that have moved the investigation forward many steps: a
scientist’s discovery of physical evidence showing that
something crashed through the trees in 1965 at the location
designated by witnesses; and the elimination of the possibil-
ity that the object was a Russian satellite or any man-made
object at all, according to the world’s leading authority on
space systems. These two developments demolish the two
preferred explanations used by the skeptics—that the object
was either a meteor (the Air Force explanation) or a Russian
satellite—and heighten the mystery by further reducing

Headlines from the

Greensburg Tribune-Review,

December 10, 1965.

IUR ✦ 30:1

4

ought to do it because the American people
quite frankly can handle the truth; and we ought
to do it because it’s the law.”

“Clinton Aide Slams Pentagon’s UFO Se-

crecy” was the headline on the CNN story that
day. “The new initiative is not setting out to prove
the existence of aliens. Rather the group wants to
legitimize the scientific investigation of unex-
plained aerial phenomena,” CNN reported.
“Podesta was one of numerous political and
media heavyweights on hand in Washington,
D.C., to announce a new group to gain access to
secret government records about UFOs.”

possible conventional explanations.

These breakthroughs occurred after the Sci Fi Channel

launched its historic “UFO Advocacy Initiative” in which,
for a few years, unprecedented resources were applied to the
investigation of a UFO case. As an independent journalist,
I was asked by Larrry Landsman, Sci Fi’s director of special
projects, to spearhead an effort seeking new government
records on a well-documented American UFO case that
included the retrieval of physical evidence. The Kecksburg
incident satisfied these and other criteria used to select a
case, and the Washington law firm Lobel, Novins & Lamont
came on board to assist with FOIA appeals and lawsuits, if
they should become necessary. “This was, and still is, a
freedom of information story,” says Landsman. “Many
witnesses say something occurred that night, and so we
provided our support to those investigating.”

In addition, a private investigator who formerly worked

for the congressional General Accounting Office and an
independent archival research firm joined the team, expand-
ing the scope of the investigation beyond FOIA. Working
with the Washington public relations firm PodestaMattoon,
the core group undertaking this project called itself the
Coalition for Freedom of Information (CFi), for which I was
appointed director of investigations. See our website at
www.freedomofinfo.org.

The CFi Kecksburg initiative won the support of

Washington insider John Podesta, President Clinton’s
former chief of staff and member of the 1997 Moynihan
Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government
Secrecy, who at the time was a law professor at
Georgetown University and now heads the Center for
American Progress. Podesta was instrumental in the de-
classification of 800 million pages of documents during
the Clinton administration and is an outspoken critic of
unnecessary government secrecy. “This initiative will
help keep the pressure on,” he explained.

“I think it’s time to open the books on questions that

have remained in the dark, on the question of government
investigations of UFOs,” Podesta told the media at CFi’s
first press conference launching the Kecksburg initiative in
October 2002. “It’s time to find out what the truth really is
that’s out there. We ought to do it because it’s right; we

“UFO

FALLS

NEAR

K

ECKSBURG

”

The CFi campaign could not have proceeded without the
solid base of meticulous work on the Kecksburg case
performed by researcher Stan Gordon for close to 40 years.

Gordon’s curiosity was piqued when, as a teenager in

nearby Greensburg, he spent the evening of December 9,
1965, glued to the radio and television as events unfolded.
He heard reports that something crashed in the woods near
the tiny village of Kecksburg at approximately 4:45 p.m.
that evening, after being seen over a number of other states
and Canada. “Many persons in the Greensburg area saw the
phenomena. State police say there is a fire in the Kecksburg
area. They are investigating,” said the 9 o’clock news on
KDKA radio in Pittsburgh.

On his black-and-white TV, Gordon watched the local

news and occasional special bulletins that broke into regular
programming to state that the military had arrived on the
scene and that the area was cordoned off. A search was
underway to locate the object.

“Unidentified Flying Object Falls near Kecksburg,

Army Ropes off Area” exclaimed the front-page headline on
the Greensburg Tribune-Review the next morning. The
article said that “the area where the object landed was
immediately sealed off on the order of U.S. Army and State
Police officials, reportedly in anticipation of a close inspec-
tion of whatever may have fallen.” U.S. Army engineers and

Sci Fi Channel

The full CFi team, including Larry Landsman (far left), Lee Helfrich

(second from left), and Stan Gordon (far right), at a Washington, D.C.,

press conference in October 2003.

Tribune-Review reporter

Robert Gatty (left) with news

anchor Bryant Gumbel,

host of the Sci Fi Channel

documentary on Kecksburg.

scientists were brought in.
“Excitement caused by
the apparent landing pro-
duced a massive traffic
jam,” as hundreds drove
to the site from surround-
ing areas.

Tribune-Review re-

porter Robert Gatty in-
terviewed an eight-year-
old boy who saw the
object fall into the woods,
and his mother, Mrs.
Arnold Kalp, who saw
blue smoke rising and

IUR ✦ 30:1

5

alerted the authorities. Gatty’s December 10 story, head-
lined “Unidentified Flying Object Report Touches off Probe
near Kecksburg,” recounts that he was denied access to the
site, by order of the Army.

Gatty’s stories were quickly superseded by reports in

numerous late-edition papers with the headlines “Searchers
Fail to Find Object” and “Fireball a Meteor, Astronomer
Explains.” Reports said that 25 state policemen and mem-
bers of Army and Air Force searched a 75-acre area until 2
a.m. and found nothing. The Air Force explained the inci-
dent as “a meteor or meteors,” adding that “there has been
no evidence of space debris . . . and all aircraft and missiles
have been accounted for.”

In a recent interview, Gatty said that his editor sent

him out that night to cover “the story of the century,” and
that he is convinced something did indeed come down in
the Kecksburg woods. “The Army appeared to be pro-
tecting something,” he wrote in a 2003 statement for a
CFi press conference. “At this point in time, nearly 40
years later, what possibly could be the reason for continu-
ing this cover-up?”

initially excited by the mysterious event as was Murphy,
raises the possibility that they too were visited by intimi-
dating officials.)

After airing the documentary, Murphy clammed up and

would no longer talk about what had initially been the story
of his lifetime, according to his wife. Yet Murphy had no
idea how important his special documentary report would
become to investigators years later, providing an intriguing,
first-hand window into the drama as it unfolded. The reso-
lute reporter did everything he possibly could to probe and
document the story. In the beginning of the piece, for
example, he provides the crucial fact that “the control tower
at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport definitely confirmed the
fact that there was an object in the sky at that time, 13
minutes before 5.”

“Object in the Woods” chronicles Murphy’s move-

ments and encounters throughout the evening in great detail.
At 8:30 p.m., after arriving on the scene at Kecksburg, he
saw State Police Fire Marshal Carl Metz and another inves-
tigator go into the woods with a Geiger counter and flash-
light, returning up the hill about 16 minutes later. While
Metz headed for his car, Murphy stopped him where no
one else could hear and asked if he had found anything. “He
looked puzzled for a second and said, I’m not sure,” Murphy
says in the broadcast. Murphy then decided to ask the
question in a different way. “After you make your report to
the captain, do you think you or the captain, perhaps, may
have something to tell me? And he [Metz] said, ‘You better
get your information from the Army.’” Sounding a bit
stunned by this statement, Murphy makes the point that it
was “very unusual” for the fire marshal, examining a fire “in
almost a clear blue sky,” to turn him over to the United States
Army, indicating that something there in the woods “showed
some significance of military value.”

A little later, at the Greensburg State Police barracks,

Murphy reports that he saw members of the army and the air
force there in uniform, along with Carl Metz. The captain
told him that he had an official statement for the record: the
state police had conducted a thorough search and “there was
nothing whatsoever in the woods.” Murphy called this in to
WHJB headquarters for broadcast during the station’s on-
going news coverage of unfolding events. When Metz and
others then got ready to leave the barracks and return to the
wooded area a second time, Metz told Murphy that he could
go with the group to the location.

While Murphy waited in his car to follow the caravan of

vehicles heading to Kecksburg, a state police officer came
from the barracks and approached him. “We got something
out there,” the officer told the radio news director, only
moments after the release of the official statement to the
contrary. “It’s blue and it’s pulsating and there’s a light on
it,” he said, adding that the military wanted to go see this
pulsating light. Murphy notes that this report matched
earlier eyewitness descriptions of blue lights emanating
from the woods right after the object landed and that, in fact,
several people said they saw a light. “I myself did not see any

Reporter John Murphy,

news director for local radio sta-
tion WHJB, made it down to the
site before the authorities ar-
rived, in response to a flood of
calls from alarmed citizens to
the station. His former wife
Bonnie Milslagle (Murphy died
in 1969) and WHJB office man-
ager Mabel Mazza both later
reported that Murphy had pho-
tographed the object.

Mabel Mazza

“He got down there before the police, before any of the

armed forces were there,” said Milslagle. “He called me and
told me he’d gotten pictures of it, but some of the film had
been confiscated. But he’d gotten one roll through.”

Mazza says she saw one picture. “It was very dark and

it was with a lot of trees around and everything. And I don’t
know how far away from the site he was. But I did see a
picture of a sort of a cone-like thing. It’s the only time I ever
saw it,” she said.

In the weeks that followed, Murphy became obsessed

with the case and developed a radio documentary called
“Object in the Woods” that included interviews conducted
that night. One day, he received an unexpected visit from
authorities in plain clothes. WHJB employee Linda Foschia
recalls that some of Murphy’s tapes were confiscated; no
one knows what happened to the photographs. A week
after this visit, which left him at first very agitated and then
uncharacteristically despondent and depressed, Murphy
aired a censored version of the original documentary.
Some interviewees had requested he remove them from
the broadcast due to fears of getting in trouble with the
police and the Army, Murphy explained on the air. (The
sudden fear of these previously forthcoming sources,

IUR ✦ 30:1

6

particular light that I could have definitely said was the light
everybody was referring to,” he adds.

When they finally arrived back at the scene of the crash,

Metz firmly forbade Murphy to accompany them into the
woods, and, despite Murphy’s pleading for permission
based on his earlier invitation, Metz offered no explanation
for the sudden change.

T

HE

WITNESSES

During the following decades, Stan Gordon, interviewing
countless people with varying levels of involvement, be-
came increasingly unable to accept the official explanation
that what was seen in the sky was a meteor, and that nothing
at all came down. For example, Pennsylvania residents saw
the object moving slowly and making turns, as if under
intelligent control. Randy Overly told Gordon that the
object passed about 200 feet over his head and stayed level,
maintaining the same height the whole time, moving about
as fast as a single-engine plane. The acorn-shaped, brownish
object made a hissing sound as it spewed greenish fire from
its rear, which terrified the young Overly and his friend.

Bill Bulebush said he was working on his car in nearby

Mammoth when he saw the object hesitate and make a turn
before descending into the woods. He and other observers
saw the object go down slowly, as if controlled.

Hundreds of people, along with the media, witnessed

different aspects of the extensive military and state police
presence in the area that night. Fireman Bob Bitner saw a
small convoy of military trucks going into the ravine and
coming out later, and was refused permission to go into the
woods himself. From his nearby upstairs bedroom window,

young John Hays watched a spectacle of flashlights, cars,
and trucks going into the woods while military officials
gathered in his living room downstairs, talking in small
groups and using his parents’ telephone. These are just a few
of the many independent reports Gordon acquired following
the event, all in great detail.

Later that night, witnesses saw an object transported

out of the area at great speed on the back of a military flatbed
tractor-trailer truck. “Not only did we see the flatbed going
up empty, we saw the flatbed coming down—loaded,”
reports Mike Slater, who said that Army officials asked him
to provide false directions to people looking for the crash
site. Sometimes these officials pointed guns at civilians
when they were too close to the barricades.

Jazz musician Jerry Betters said he was harshly ordered

at gunpoint to leave the area after he and his friends caught
a glimpse of an acorn-shaped object, “a little bigger than a
Volkswagen,” on the back of an Army flatbed truck as it
struggled up through a field. For some reason, it was not
fully covered. “I could see this hieroglyphic stuff all on the
back,” Betters said. “I would swear on the Bible and take a
lie detector test,” he wrote in a notarized statement with a
drawing, for one of CFi’s FOIA requests to the Army.

Stan Gordon

Photos of damaged trees near the crash location which were used by

scientists in 2003 to locate the site and conduct a forensic investigation

revealing new, physical evidence.

James Romansky

Bob Bitner

IUR ✦ 30:1

7

Firefighter James Romansky saw the flatbed truck

speeding down the hill in a military convoy, past the
Kecksburg firehouse. “I and many others could see the
object and its shape under the tarpaulin. There is no meteor-
ite in the world that looks like that,” Romansky said in a
recent interview.

Romansky, one of the very first to see the object on the

ground before the military arrived, has been a crucial
witness, providing a detailed description from a few feet
away. He said he saw a bronze-colored, acorn-shaped object
with no windows, doors, or seams, partially buried in a
gully. It was about 10–12 feet tall, large enough for a man to
stand up in, and 8–12 feet in diameter. Romansky said he
saw strange symbols that looked like Egyptian hieroglyph-
ics on the back, or “bumper area” of the acorn. He stayed on
the scene with a group of firemen until ordered to leave by
two men in trench coats followed by uniformed military.

In August 1987, Romansky was the first witness to take

Gordon to the impact site, which turned out to be the same
area where Gordon had previously photographed damaged
trees. Six months later, John Hayes escorted Gordon to the
same location, where as a boy he had seen the disturbed area
around the wash the morning after the object was removed.
In 1988, Gordon received a tip that Bulebush had also
approached the object at close range. After providing Gordon
with a detailed description, Bulebush went into the woods to
find the location from a different entry point than that used
by Romansky. He found a particular tree that he remembered,
and pointed to the exact same spot in the streambed that
Romansky and Hayes had previously identified.

The most extraordinary part of this story is that

Romansky, Hayes, and Bulebush independently took Gor-
don to the same location, without having ever discussed the
case among themselves, and each had no idea what the other
had said to Gordon. The descriptions of the object provided
by Romansky and Bulebush (who had never even met at the
time) were extremely similar. Since then, three additional
people have reported to Gordon that they too saw the object
before it was removed from the ground, although they are
not willing to go public.

State Police Fire Marshal Carl Metz, whom John Murphy

witnessed going into the wooded impact area twice that
evening, apparently saw something extraordinary but kept
the information close to his chest until his death in 1989.
Former Pennsylvania State Trooper Bob Koveleskie, who
was working in eastern Pennsylvania that night, says that he
asked Metz shortly after the event what had happened, and
Metz replied that he was sworn to secrecy by the Army and
couldn’t discuss it. Years later, former Greensburg Police
Dispatcher Howard Burns reported in a videotaped inter-
view with Gordon that Metz took part in a group discussion
at the Greensburg police station in the early 1980s. Burns
says that Metz told the group that he was one of the first at
the Kecksburg impact area and initially thought he had came
upon a crashed aircraft due to the tree damage. According to
Burns, Metz reported that when he saw the object close up,

“it was like no object he had ever seen before” and he was
ordered not to talk about it. Burns says Metz wasn’t reveal-
ing everything he knew by keeping the details secret. He
wouldn’t say what it was—only that it was like nothing he
had ever seen before. Both Kovaleskie and Burns told
Gordon on tape that Metz was highly respected, honest and
had great integrity, and that they would believe anything he
said.

In April 2005, Gordon interviewed another retired police

officer with an extensive and distinguished law enforcement
background who verified that he also spoke to Metz, a good
friend at the time, within a day or two of the incident. Metz
told him that he had seen the object in the woods.

“Multitudes of people had some association with this

incident,” says Gordon. “Most do not accept the government’s
explanation.” If this were simply a meteor, then these
witnesses to the acorn-shaped object—in the sky, on the
ground, and on the flatbed truck—are either lying or suffer-
ing from some kind of mass hallucination. Neither possibil-
ity seems plausible.

In the 1980s, investigators obtained copies of the Air

Force Project Blue Book file on the case. A handwritten
memo stated that a “three man team” was sent out from
Oakdale, Pennsylvania, “to investigate and pick up an
object that started a fire.” The files say that members of the
662nd Radar Squadron searched until 2 a.m. and found
nothing.

Maxwell Air Force Base sent CFi the December 1965

Historical Record of the 662nd Radar Squadron based in
Oakdale—the same document released to Stan Gordon
years earlier—that provided the relevant names. The squad-
ron had a liaison officer with Project Blue Book, and it was
from the Oakdale base, about 50 miles from Kecksburg, that
the “three man team” was sent to search for the object. One
officer, James Cashman, later called Blue Book headquar-
ters from Oakdale to report that nothing was found, accord-
ing to the Blue Book files, although he was not one of those
sent out on the search.

Our private investigator was able to locate Cashman

Sketch by Charles Hanna of the Kecksburg object seen in

a building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, based on

an eyewitness account.

IUR ✦ 30:1

8

and three other key personnel from the 662nd, and Gordon
interviewed a fifth in 1991. Only one of these, a lieutenant
whom I will not name to respect his privacy, said he actually
went out to search for the object that night. This officer said
he did not observe any Army presence in the area, any excess
civilian activity, or the large spotlights in the woods ob-
served by witnesses and reporter John Murphy. This seems
impossible if he was anywhere near the correct location and
directly contradicts press reports about the large military
presence and civilian crowds. He said he and three other
members of the 662nd searched the woods with flashlights
and found nothing.

It is revealing that puzzling discrepancies exist among

key points of the various accounts, as well as between
aspects of the statements of these officers and reports from
both the media and Project Blue Book. For example, the
lieutenant who searched the woods said there were four in
his search team; another officer told us that he had driven
with the team to a nearby barrack while two from Oakdale
conducted the search with a state trooper. (This could have
been the “three man team” referred to by Blue Book,
although Blue Book said that the three were all from Oakdale.)
Another officer told me there was no search at all, and that
the reports coming in to the Oakdale base concerned only an
object in the sky and not an object on the ground. He
remembers very well the high volume of calls from the local
area and speaking to some of the callers, and says that if
there had been a search, he definitely would have known. He
was adamant that there wasn’t one. And yet another told me
that the object was a Russian satellite, but insisted that he
made that determination only from newspaper and televi-
sion reports.

According to Project Blue Book records, Cashman called

Blue Book headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
twice from the Oakdale base, including a final call at 2 a.m.,
to report that nothing was found. Oddly, Cashman says he has
no memory of any event, phone calls, or heightened activity
at that time. He stated that he was the Blue Book liaison officer
(as stated in the Blue Book files), as opposed to the lieutenant
who told me he was the Blue Book officer.

We are not certain whether these contradictory and

sometimes confusing reports are simply a question of jumbled
memories after all these years, or if other factors are at play.
Is it possible that this small group was taken to a different
location from the one that was cordoned off by the Army,
and that they searched the wrong site? If this did occur, was
the state trooper who took the Air Force team to the wrong
site instructed by someone to do so? If so, the officers are
honestly reporting that nothing was found. Would it there-
fore have been possible—since Project Blue Book did not
have access to cases higher than a secret clearance—that
Blue Book actually never knew about an object retrieved
from another location by the Army?

On the other hand, Murphy reports seeing what ap-

peared to be members of the 662nd Radar Squadron at the
edge of the woods after leaving the police barracks where he
had first encountered them. If the lieutenant was one of these
men, he could not possibly have missed the surrounding
military and civilian activity. Were these officers perhaps
sworn not to reveal what happened for national security
reasons, and thus their cover stories have differences? We
don’t know, and we won’t know until the government
releases the records.

After the Air Force search for the object was com-

pleted, the lieutenant who searched prepared a handwritten
investigation report as required by Air Force regulations,
which was then typewritten by an administrative specialist
(the same person who told me he believed the object was a
Russian satellite, oddly enough). For reasons unknown, this
report, which documented the unsuccessful search for the
object, was not included with the Blue Book case files on the
Kecksburg incident at the National Archives. “It was an
inconclusive report that it could have been a meteorite,” the
former lieutenant, now 62, told me in a 2003 telephone
interview. He provided CFi’s attorney with a signed affida-
vit regarding his writing and filing of this report, and we
submitted the affidavit to the Air Force requesting a copy of
this crucial document. “Because the investigation was under
Project Blue Book, a copy of my report would have eventu-
ally been forwarded to the Project Blue Book headquarters,
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,” he wrote in the affidavit.
So far, no response has been forthcoming to this request.

W

HAT

WAS

—

OR

WASN

’

T

—

THE

OBJECT

?

“Based on the accounts of the many eyewitnesses whom I
have interviewed, I am convinced that an object did fall from
the sky and apparently was removed by the military,” said
Stan Gordon. “Many have asked me what I believe the
object was, and my reply still is ‘I don’t know.’ As I have
stated in the past, the most likely possibilities are (1) a highly
advanced man-made space probe with some controlled-
reentry capability, (2) a secret military or government ex-
periment, (3) an extraterrestrial spacecraft.”

In looking at item (1) above, many have proposed that

the object may have been some kind of Soviet satellite or
debris that was secretly hidden away during the cold war.

A model of the object

that sits behind the

Kecksburg Volunteer

Fire Department, made

for the Unsolved

Mysteries TV series in

1990. According to

James Romansky, the

back, or bumper end

(bottom of the acorn),

is too wide in

proportion to the rest.

IUR ✦ 30:1

9

The leading contender, argued mainly by space consultant
James Oberg, has been Cosmos 96, a failed Russian Venera
probe that the U.S. Space Command reported reentered the
earth’s atmosphere over Canada at 3:18 a.m. the same day—
far from Kecksburg and more than 13 hours earlier.

In 2003, I conducted a series of decisive interviews

exploring this question with Nicholas L. Johnson, chief
scientist for orbital debris at the NASA Johnson Space
Center, who is recognized internationally as the leading
authority on orbital debris and foreign space systems. Among
many other works, Johnson authored the book Handbook of
Soviet Lunar and Planetary Exploration (American Astro-
nautical Society, 1979), in which he wrote about Cosmos 96
and related spacecraft.

At my request, Johnson examined the orbital data for

Cosmos 96 and was able to calculate when it would have
passed over Pennsylvania if it had continued in orbit that day
(which means disregarding the U.S. Space Command infor-
mation). That time, when it would have traveled from north
to south, was approximately 6:20 a.m. “I can tell you
categorically that there is no way that any debris from
Cosmos 96 could have landed in Pennsylvania anywhere
around 4:45 p.m.,” Johnson told me. “That’s an absolute.
Orbital mechanics is very strict.” One part of Cosmos 96
could not have stayed in orbit until 4:45 p.m. after the object
came apart hours earlier in Canada, as some had speculated.

In an April 2005 email to Towers Productions during its

production of a documentary for the History Channel,
Johnson summarized his investigation as follows:

In response to a request by Ms. Kean, I researched the
NASA Orbital Debris Program Office data files for
tracking data (aka two-line element sets from the U.S.
Space Surveillance Network) on Cosmos 96 (U.S. Cata-
log Number 01742); however, no data for that object
were found. I later contacted Air Force Space Com-
mand and received historical tracking data for Cosmos
96. Using these data and an Air Force Space Command

software package, I was able to reconstruct the possible
flight path (groundtrack) of Cosmos 96 on 9 December
1965. I sent to Ms. Kean on 10 October [2003] an email
containing two graphics depicting the only possible
southbound pass of Cosmos 96 on 9 December 1965, if
it had not already reentered the atmosphere. No part of
Cosmos 96 could have landed in Pennsylvania in the
local afternoon of 9 December 1965.

Even more intriguing than the fact that the Kecksburg

object could not have been any part of Cosmos 96 is that
Johnson stated that Cosmos 96 was the only catalogued
object to reenter on December 9, and that no other man-
made object from any country came down that day. He
explained that anything not catalogued would have been so
small that it would not have survived reentry, and anything
larger would have been detected. “I cannot absolutely con-
firm that it was not some completely unreported event, but
the chances of that are virtually nil,” Johnson said. “You
can’t launch something without somebody seeing it. By
1965 the U.S. and Soviets were both reporting their launches.”

The possibility of a U.S. reconnaissance satellite drop-

ping a large film canister for recovery on that day has also
been ruled out. These capsules were dropped following
secret missions over the Soviet Union, and Johnson said that
sometimes they fell where they weren’t supposed to. The
CIA recently declassified data on the reconnaissance flights,
and by checking launch and retrieval times, Johnson deter-
mined that there was no secret mission that could have led
to an inadvertent reentry of a capsule on that day. “This was
the only other thing I could think of that could have fallen out
of space and was man-made,” he said.

Before consulting Johnson, I had spoken with Phillip S.

Clark of London’s Molniya Space Consultancy by tele-
phone in the U.K. Another renowned expert who studied the
Soviet and Chinese space programs for more than 20 years,
Clark also eliminated Cosmos 96 as a possibility, based
simply on the comparison with the many eyewitness reports
providing almost identical descriptions of the object. The
Cosmos capsule was only three feet in diameter—much
smaller than the object reported by Kecksburg witnesses.
Clark also pointed out that the Cosmos capsule could not
have made turns or descended slowly at an angle, since it
would have been propelled only by the pull of gravity
towards earth, and it most likely would have created a crater
upon impact. The letters CCCP (Russian for USSR) which
appear prominently on the body of Cosmos capsule would
have been easily recognized by the witnesses, if the letters
had not burned off upon reentry.

In 1965, unlike today, the U.S. government did not have

the technical means of detecting natural bodies, such as a
meteor, suddenly coming into the earth’s atmosphere, so
NORAD space surveillance radar could not detect meteors.
Therefore, unfortunately, we do not have tracking data that
can tell us anything about the 1965 fireball shooting across

(continued on page 28)

A drawing of the Soviet space capsule from Cosmos 96,

about three feet in diameter, which reentered the

atmosphere 13 hours before the Kecksburg incident.

IUR ✦ 30:1

2 8

K

ECKSBURG

—continued from page 9

four states before entering the Pennsylvania skies; we have
to rely on witness reports and amateur photographs for this
part of the object’s journey.

In order to address whether the object was a secret

military or government experiment, we need a greater
understanding of the technology our government possessed
in 1965. Could the military have created devices with the
capabilities that this object demonstrated? If this is some-
thing so secret that there is no accessible paper trail, there
may not be any way to definitively answer this question, no
matter how far-fetched the possibility becomes.

The more we learn about the Kecksburg case, the fewer

the options become to explain the mysterious object, mak-
ing the case all the more compelling. As Peter Sturrock,
emeritus professor of applied physics at Stanford Univer-
sity, says: “In principle, we can prove a hypothesis not only
by finding strong evidence in its favor, but also by finding
strong evidence against every other possibility.”

S

TONEWALLING

AND

THE

NASA

LAWSUIT

CFi’s initial round of requests under the Freedom of Infor-
mation Act, sent in January 2003, targeted over a dozen
federal and state agencies for information on various as-
pects of the Kecksburg incident. In most cases, we received
a “no records” response or were referred to other agencies.

NASA was unique, however, in that it denied us records

that we knew were in the agency’s possession as recently as
eight years ago when materials were released to other
investigators. We had asked NASA for documents on four
specific items which we knew they had, including the
“Fragology Files” from 1962 to 1967, described as “reports
of space objects’ recovery, [and] analysis of fragments to
determine national ownership and vehicle origin.”

In 1995, NASA sent Gordon a “records transmittal and

receipt” listing the fragology files by name. However, he
could not view the content of the files because NASA
claimed that they had been missing since 1987. This was
questionable, since the first list that Gordon received had a
handwritten notation saying that the files were at the Federal
Records Center in 1994. A subsequent copy of this same
document released by NASA had the “1994” notation
removed, when NASA informed CFi that the files were
missing.

The list of fragology files includes the name “Richard

M. Schulherr” as custodian of these files during the time of
the Kecksburg incident. Schulherr, a NASA engineer, also
served as NASA representative for Project Moondust in the
1960s, as indicated by a Moondust report signed by Schulherr
and released through FOIA. Thus, along with the fragology
files, we requested records on NASA employee Schulherr
and on Project Moondust in general.

The highly secret Project Moondust would have very

likely been involved with the Kecksburg retrieval if the

critical of what they viewed as his excesses, including a
penchant for lacerating personal attacks on those who too
firmly dissented from Klassian dicta.

I met Klass on a few occasions, the first of them at his

condominium in Washington in September 1980, and found
him a hard man to like, and not because we disagreed about
UFOs. He simply struck me as a man not overflowing in
social graces. Still, we corresponded at great length between
the late 1970s and the early 1990s, when Klass angrily
terminated the exchange.

I once wrote a comprehensive survey of his methods

(“Klass vs. the ‘UFO Promoters,’” Fate, February 1981).
Even then, it seemed to some observers that ufology had
been transformed into Klass’s personal Satan; in some of his
polemical excesses, he appeared to view ufologists as some-
thing like the personification of evil, once even depicting
them as de facto allies of the Soviet Union because, like the
Communists, UFO proponents judged some U.S. govern-
ment pronouncements to be dubiously credible.

As I remarked in the Fate profile, “Klass never has missed

an opportunity to portray himself as the martyr, the outcast
whose sole interest is in finding and perpetuating Truth . . . while
‘UFO promoters’—he can no longer bring himself to call them
UFO proponents—cynically exploit public credulity and ig-
nore his reasonable explanations of cases.” In a sense Klass was
less a UFO antagonist than a demonologist.

Some excitable UFO proponents returned the favor,

with dark hints or overheated charges that he was actually a
CIA agent tasked to cover up the reality of extraterrestrial
visitation. Klass, of course, was no such thing. If anything,
he suffered from too much sincerity. More sober ufologists
provided point-by-point refutations of his explanations for
prominent cases. But as with all crusaders, Klass barely
noticed. Facts were not ends in themselves, only a means to
a larger end, and if they did not serve, they were discarded.

He attracted an audience of those who, if they knew

nothing else about UFOs, know they are nonsense, and they
had Klass to speak for them. For years he published a
newsletter which catered to UFOphobes and to those who
like their sentences italicized, underlined, set in bold type,
and ending in exclamation points—sometimes all at the
same time. Though Klass more and more came across as a
self-parodist, he was—and doubtless will remain—the hero
of a movement of true-believing disbelievers. To the more
open-minded, however, he will serve as the personification
of the fanatic: one who, having lost sight of his objective,
redoubles his efforts.

—Jerome Clark

FUND FOR UFO RESEARCH

As a partner with CUFOS in the UFO Research
Coalition, the Fund for UFO Research has long
been engaged in the support of scientific research
and education. Tax-deductible contributions can
be sent to: Fund for UFO Research, P.O. Box
277, Mt. Rainier, MD 20712.

IUR ✦ 30:1

2 9

event occurred as witnesses report. According to an official
1961 Air Force Intelligence memo, classified at the time,
Project Moondust’s function was “to locate, recover, and
deliver descended foreign space vehicles.” The memo also
states that the same Air Force Air Intelligence Squadron
responsible for Moondust, which had field units stationed
throughout the U.S., was responsible for the “investigation
of reliably reported unidentified flying objects within the
United States.” It goes on to say that these functions involve
“employment of qualified field intelligence personnel on a
quick reaction basis to recover or perform field exploitation
of unidentified flying objects, or known Soviet/Bloc aero-
space vehicles, weapons systems, and/or residual compo-
nents of such equipment.”

Since we already had a document confirming that

Schulherr was indeed on NASA’s staff in the 1960s, a “no
records” response to this request, among others, pointed to
a “no effort” non-search on the part of NASA’s FOIA office.

The appeal to NASA’s rebuff, filed on behalf of CFi by

Lobel, Novins & Lamont in May 2003, included five exhib-
its demonstrating that the agency had previously released
the requested information, including documents on Project
Moondust and Cosmos 96 which we had also requested, and
that Schulherr did indeed work for NASA.

Among the exhibits was an intriguing news article

about Schulherr’s activities in 1968, when he “flashed fancy
government credentials” and required the person in posses-
sion of a mysterious cone-shaped object found in the North
Carolina woods to release it for testing in Washington. The
reporter states that Schulherr was “a staff engineer” with
NASA. In his letter about the analysis of the object—
determined to be junk from a metal refining operation—
Schulherr explains that the object was tested since “poten-
tially it could have been a fragment of space hardware, a
meteorite, or terrestrial material of uncommon shape.” This
illustrates his role at NASA only three years after the
Kecksburg incident, particularly of interest since two wit-
nesses reported seeing clearly identified NASA officials on
the scene. (Unfortunately, we found out that Schulherr is
deceased, and his family members declined to speak with us.)

In June, NASA granted CFi’s appeal and remanded the

request back to its FOIA office for a new search, at which
time it committed to undertake responsive searches on an
“expedited basis.”

Since no response was provided, despite this promise,

and after waiting a total of 10 months for information
pertinent to the Kecksburg case, CFi announced its intent to
file a lawsuit at a Washington press conference in October
2003. As had occurred the year before at our first press
conference, this event was widely covered by national and
international media, including Reuters. A piece on the
national television channel MSNBC opened by stating,
“You know stories in small towns often tend to take on a life
of their own. . . . Well now the Sci Fi Channel is trying to get
to the bottom of it all, going so far as to join a lawsuit against
the government to reveal what it knows.”

“I think its fair to say that we have truly entered the

realm of science fiction in Washington, D.C.,” commented
John Podesta at this second press conference, “when it’s fair
game to disclose the identity of a clandestine CIA agent
[reference to Valerie Plame] but not the records of an
unexplained crash in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, that oc-
curred 38 years ago.”

Within hours of the press conference, NASA informed

our attorney, Lee Helfrich, that the agency would release 36
pages of documents immediately, an apparent attempt to
thwart legal action. However, the material proved to be
useless and unresponsive. The lawsuit, in which I am the
plaintiff, was filed in Washington, D.C., on December 9,
2003, the 38th anniversary of the Kecksburg incident. “I’m
hopeful that our lawsuit will be successful because NASA
has given us a great record to show that it’s recalcitrant and
acting in bad faith,” Helfrich said.

As of this writing, the court is still considering the case.

Helfrich summarizes the status of the case as follows:

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
denied NASA’s request for a ruling that its search for
records was adequate, but gave the agency another
opportunity to make its case. NASA took the court up on
its offer and filed new affidavits of agency officials,
under penalty of perjury, to support its claim that the
FOIA search was exhaustive. Kean immediately filed
papers with the court highlighting that NASA’s new
affidavits contained factual representations that were
flatly contrary to the facts relied upon by NASA in
support of its original motion. The court is now consid-
ering this new round of information.

The lawsuit against NASA could be the first of several

against government agencies, including the U.S. Army, U.S.
Air Force, and the Department of Defense, which continue
to stonewall efforts to obtain records on the Kecksburg
incident under the Freedom of Information Act.

Another amazing example of recalcitrance occurred

when we sent a second request to the U.S. Army following
its initial unwillingness to take action. We provided the
Army with newspaper articles that clearly state the Army
was on the scene, along with excerpts from a detailed radio
broadcast revealing the same. We included signed witness
statements of encounters with Army personnel, some stating
that soldiers pointed weapons at civilians, and descriptions
of clearly marked Army vehicles. Reporter Robert Gatty’s
account stated that he saw 10 or more Army personnel
preventing people and reporters from entering the area
where the object was believed to have landed, and that he
questioned some of them.

We documented all of this for the Army, but it made no

difference. Helfrich points out that the Army regulation on
specificity advises the public to provide “descriptive infor-
mation” that “is event related and includes the circum-
stances that resulted in the record being created or the date
and circumstances surrounding the event the record cov-

IUR ✦ 30:1

3 0

ers.” CFi’s information established the participation of the
Army, including military personnel from the U.S. Army
Support Detachment in Oakdale, in a publicly acknowl-
edged investigation of a landed object on December 9,
1965, at 4:45 p.m. near the town of Kecksburg. Even so, the
Army FOIA office told CFi that we had not described what
we wanted with sufficient specificity to enable it even to
begin a FOIA search!

Throughout this process, the archival research firm

History Associates conducted extensive searches at federal
records centers and other government and military reposito-
ries outside the Washington, D.C., area. Files at some of
these locations are not publicly available and can only be
examined through permission of the agency that created
them, which of course makes access difficult, and in some
cases they may be classified. History Associates was able to
provide us with specific accession numbers for files in
various repositories that we then presented to NASA and the
Army. These other facilities may contain the requested
documents that FOIA offices have not been able to locate,
but the process of acquiring them is laborious and costly, if
it’s possible at all.

To this day, no government agency other than the Air

Force (in Project Blue Book) has even acknowledged that
anything took place on December 9, 1965, in Kecksburg, let
alone released any relevant information about the incident.

T

HE

SMOKING

GUN

Perhaps the most important breakthrough since I became
involved in the case took place back in the Kecksburg woods,
at the crash site that Romansky and Bulebush had indepen-
dently shown to Stan Gordon years earlier. In the spring of
2003, the Sci Fi Channel brought geomorphologist and
geoarcheologist J. Steven Kite and Professor of Forestry Ray
R. Hicks, both of West Virginia University, to the site.

Kite conducted an investigation with two archeologists

from the Department of Geology and Geography to search
for “physical evidence of landscape disturbance or artifacts
that might be associated with the 1965 event,” supple-
mented by a magnetometer and radiation survey.

Kite did not find any relevant surface disturbance or

artifacts associated with the incident and could offer no
confirmation that anything exceptional occurred at the site
in 1965. “The evidence was either so meager as to be easily
overlooked, or was subsequently obliterated or obscured by
natural or artificial processes,” he stated. He noted that the
methods of his team “would have been sufficient to discern
any digging, bulldozing, or burial done to ‘cover-up’ the
evidence of the 1965 event. In fact, a cover-up would be
easier for trained geomorphologists to identify than the
evidence of a low-energy impact event.” Gordon and others
have noted that since the object landed in a stream bed with
water running through it intermittently, erosion would make
detection of soil disturbance extremely difficult after all
these years. In any case, Kite pointed out that no past event

can be ruled out based on negative evidence.

However, Kite went on to make another important

observation based on his study. “The obvious lack of wide-
spread destruction from the 1965 impact allows one pos-
sible explanation to be eliminated as a cause of the Decem-
ber 1965 observations: high-velocity impact by a large,
intact satellite or meteorite. At least one account related an
object ‘about the size of a Volkswagon’ being hauled away
from the site during the night after the event. If such an
object, especially a dense meteorite, impacted the earth at
high velocity, the impact would have created havoc for the
surrounding forest vegetation and left a pronounced impact
crater.” He notes that the vegetation and landscape he
studied “record neither such a high-velocity impact nor the
major reclamation effort that would be required to cover up
the evidence of such an event.”

Ray Hicks, on the other hand, made a significant discovery

through his study of the trees, providing solid physical evidence
that something came down. With the help of witness John
Hayes, who lived next to the location in 1965 and observed tree
damage at the time, Hicks was able to find the damaged trees
which matched photographs of large broken branches taken by
Gordon at the same location in the mid-1980s. The falling
object is believed to have made this damage.

“I utilized the photographs as a primary source of

information and based on the tree species, as recognized
from the photos and the crown architecture, I was able to
find the exact trees pictured in one photograph,” Hicks
explained in a written statement.

He presented his findings following the airing of a

November 2003 Sci Fi Channel documentary making the
new discoveries public for the first time. He writes:

The trees were approximately 70 years of age, which
would make them approximately 40 years old in 1965.
The growth pattern was determined for the trees by
observing the width of annual rings. One of the trees in
the photo was a black cherry which had it’s top broken
out (presumably after being struck by the object). Un-
fortunately this tree was now hollow from decay that
was probably a result of the wound. This made it
impossible to look at the growth rings of this tree. But
an adjacent undamaged black walnut tree, also pictured
in the photo, did display a slight increase in growth for
a few years following 1965. This would be consistent
with the fact that the adjacent black cherry tree was
broken in 1965, since it would provide additional grow-
ing space for the undamaged walnut tree.

Hicks attempted to reconstruct the most likely trajec-

tory path of the object using plastic flagging. He states:

One of the trees (a white ash) along this path displayed
a forked and crooked stem at a height that would be
consistent with the assumed trajectory. We obtained an
increment core from the tree and again looked at the
growth pattern of the rings. There was a dramatic

IUR ✦ 30:1

3 1

reduction in growth of this tree that appeared to begin
in 1967 or 1968 and lasted for about 20 years. If I missed
one or two rings in the count, it would put the year of
reduced growth at 1966. This would be consistent with
this tree being damaged in 1965. An adjacent ash of
similar age and size, but outside the assumed trajectory
was cored and it did not display the dramatic growth
reduction of the ash that was in the path. This would
suggest that the reason for the dramatic growth reduc-
tion of the tree in the path was not due to a climatic
event, such as drought, but was probably due to some
specific injury to the tree.

Standing in the woods at the time, and speaking to the

producers of the documentary, Steven Kite spontaneously
commented on the significance of his colleague’s discovery.
“The damage that Ray [Hicks] identified formed a pattern. It
formed a clear trajectory. It is a reasonable trajectory from
some of the other observations that were made. And the real
nice thing about it, it has a date to it: 1965. And since there is
obvious, visible damage, that is a smoking gun so to speak, as
to what caused the decrease in growth of that individual tree.”

The Air Force stance that nothing came down is now

even more untenable. Trees do not tell tall tales or engage in
group hallucinations. The saying has it that we often can’t
see the forest for the trees, but in this case, it’s the trees that
show us the true nature of the forest.

What was the importance of the object that caused the

military to rapidly respond to the tiny village of Kecksburg?
Who authorized soldiers to brandish weapons at local citi-
zens approaching the landing site? For how long will the
citizens of Pennsylvania be denied information that is rightly
theirs under American law? We still don’t have the answers
to these and many other questions, despite the four decades
that have passed. The U.S. government may never reveal the
true identity of the Kecksburg object, but the investigation
has been well worth the effort—and it’s not over yet. ✦

D

OTY

—continued from page 25

Beyond Bennewitz.” The parallels with Redfern’s encoun-
ters with his sources are obvious and depressing.)

Redfern was first approached in London by a man with

British Home Office credentials who claimed to be a UFO
buff and who gave him the broad outlines of the Japanese
Paperclip Roswell tale. But there was no follow-up, and
Redfern forgot about it until five years later, when he was
approached by . . . The Black Widow.

“Because she does not want her identity revealed, for

reasons that will shortly become apparent, I will refer to her
as the Black Widow. From the mid-1940s to the early 1950s,
she had been assigned to the Oak Ridge National Labora-
tory, Tennessee, and she said she had firsthand knowledge
of the Roswell mystery that I ‘might find interesting.’” She
approached him after a speaking engagement in Los Ange-
les in 2001: “Those bodies—the Roswell bodies—they
weren’t aliens,” she said quietly. “The government could
care less about stories about alien bodies found at Roswell—
except to hide the truth. Those bodies were Japanese people.”

The widow has some of the picture, but not all. Mostly,

she is an expert on radiation experiments at Oak Ridge circa
1947, but drops important clues throughout the book as the
story develops. Somehow, she picked up a great deal at the
Oak Ridge water cooler, especially that there were three
classified balloon flights at White Sands in May, June, and
July 1947, and that at least two were disasters.

The Black Widow soon sends friends, such as “Bill

Salter,” described as “a former employee of the Psychologi-
cal Strategy Board” seconded to Oak Ridge to do counterin-
telligence work. Salter has much to add to the Widow’s story.

And then we meet “Al Barker,” who worked with the

Army’s Psychological Warfare Center. Here is what Barker
has to say: “. . . if the Soviets uncovered the truth about the
Nazi and Japanese links to the ‘high altitude idiocy’ at White
Sands and elsewhere, this would have caused major reper-
cussions between the United States and its allies in the
postwar world. Hence the cover story put out by the Psycho-
logical Strategy Board and, later, by the Army’s Psychologi-
cal Warfare Center that the bodies were from a crashed UFO
in case the Soviets, the press, UFO researchers, and America’s
allies came snooping.” (Never mind that nobody thought
Roswell was ET until 1978, and the public didn’t hear about
that until 1980. This tiny fact demolishes the credibility of
Barker’s story.)

And then there is the main informer, “the Colonel,” a

man who buttonholed Redfern at the Henderson, Nevada,
UFO conference in 2003. “Having spent fifteen years oper-
ating deep within the heart of American intelligence, the
Colonel claims that in 1969, while working with the Defense
Intelligence Agency, he read a top-secret document that, as
far as he is concerned, laid to rest the tales about flying
saucers and alien bodies recovered from the desert of New
Mexico in the summer of 1947 and told the true story about
the Roswell events.” And further, not exactly to our surprise,

EX-MINISTER SPEAKS AT UFO CON

Paul Hellyer, Canadian Minister of National Defence
from 1963 to 1968, announced in September that he
believes UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors and that some
governments—the United States at least—know all about
it and are covering up. He also believes American scien-
tists have re-engineered alien wreckage from the UFO
crash at Roswell, N.Mex., in 1947 to produce modern
technical marvels.

Hellyer spoke September 25 at a conference spon-

sored by MUFON Central Canada and held on the Univer-
sity of Toronto campus. He described a UFO sighting he
had while camping out with his wife and some friends: “A
bright light appeared in the sky and appeared to zig and
zag across the horizon.” He added that he started taking
the issue much more seriously after watching ABC-TV’s
UFO special with Peter Jennings in February 2005.